Paul Tudor Jones and His ‘Careless’ Remarks About Women

A billionaire hedge-fund manager found himself embroiled in controversy this week not for his trades or pay checks but for his remarks on female traders.

Bloomberg News

Paul Tudor Jones, the head of Tudor Investment Corp., told an audience at the University of Virginia that he thinks it’s difficult for mothers to be successful macro-traders if they have a baby, because of the potential for distraction.

Jones said in his experience having a child is a “killer” for any desire to trade, adding “as soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it,” while motioning to his chest, according to a video posted by the Washington Post.

He did note he is a father of four children, three of them girls, and called motherhood a “beautiful” experience, but questioned a woman’s ability to pull away for traders. He said he didn’t believe it was the case for managers and noted he felt similar concern about distractions for traders going through a divorce.

Jones is a well-known trader who founded the Robin Hood Foundation, which raises millions from Wall Street to fight poverty in New York, and who hosts a rather large display of Christmas lights at his home in Greenwich, Conn., though he typically avoids the spotlight like this.

“I believe that great success is possible in any field — from music to mathematics to macro trading — as long as a woman or man has the skill, passion, and repetitions to work through the inevitable life events that arise along the way,” he added.

But the comments had already caught the social-media scene and blogosphere, where a debate on women in the workforce has recently been carried by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, who published a book on the topic this year that’s currently No. 2 on the best-seller list, and former Lehman Brothers’ CFO Erin Callan. Former Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck last week bought a women’s networking group, 85 Broads, to “invest” in women, citing the ongoing debate.

Sheila Wellington, an executive-in-residence at NYU’s Stern School of Business and former president of Catalyst, a women’s leadership organization, said the debate has picked up this year and been interesting.

“Financial-services companies have made some strides and have recognized you simply can’t write off the brains of 50% of the world’s population,” Wellington said, while adding Jones seemed to have “written off” that population.

Kate Warne, investment strategist at St. Louis-based Edward Jones, which manages $670 billion, said Tudor Jones’ comments crossed her radar this week, but she didn’t dwell on them.

“It’s rude and inappropriate, but beyond that it doesn’t have much of an impact on me,” she said in an interview with MoneyBeat. “We all shrugged and moved on.”

That wasn’t exactly the reaction on Twitter, where his comments were enough to garner his three names a hashtag, and was the talk of the business news for much of the day.

Abigail Doolittle, a technical strategist at The Seaport Group, a boutique investment bank in New York, described Tudor Jones’ comments as “unfortunate and careless,” but, she personally wasn’t offended by them.

“Being a good trader doesn’t have anything to do about being a man or being a woman,” she said.“It’s about going after a good opportunity, being aggressive, objective and having killer instinct. Irrespective of gender, someone who has those qualities and is driven by the thrill of the whole thing will succeed. That’s all that matters.”

Stephanie Ruhle, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank overseeing hedge fund clients and now anchor on Bloomberg Television, Tweeted:

“It’s distressing if he thinks it’s okay to say those things,” she said. “I think it’s a measure of how much further we have to go as a society, but beyond that, it’s not very relevant to me or to most women.”

Wellington pointed to Yahoo 's CEO Marissa Mayer, who took over the Internet giant while pregnant and skipped taking a long maternity leave.

“As far as I can tell, a mother is not lactating forever,” Wellington added.